Rose

Times New Roman is wayyyy too classy for Trump Administration. They should switch to Comic Sans MS.

…Oh no, I’m re-heating font jokes that people older than me found funny decades ago. What has this present political climate reduced us to?

I’ve heard of slow cooking, but this is next level stuff.

In this episode of “are the straights okay”, we get yet another troubling crumb of information: No. I allege some of them are very much not okay. Some of them aren’t thinking. Not doing the think before they do whatever they do.

In the 1980s, home computers were sold like this:

“Look at these awesome games, kids! And as for your parents, uh… well, you could use the computers to… uh… I dunno… keep track of the contents of the fridge? Yeah, let’s go with that.”

Nobody ever did that. Not then, not now.

Don’t buy a smart fridge, it’s a scam

Limiting the power mod reach is a good thing, but still, this will break Reddit. Ordinary users will not be lining up to step in as small time moderators. Especially if Reddit Inc is going to remove them if they do anything they don’t like.

Reddit Inc will just go “what the hell, we’ll throw more AI shit in the Automoderator. It’s not like it’ll do worse than the current arbitrary quagmire of moderation rules - or maybe it will be, who can tell the difference anyway”.

At this point, I can only say one thing fairly confidently:

We’re certainly living in a timeline

I don’t want to go back to Reddit so I’m just going to assume r/okbuddychicanery is going to have a field day.

Being a “thinker” isn’t exactly a high bar. A fish can do it (depending on the definition). I mean I suppose I can think, but I wouldn’t brag about it.

The problem isn’t that the data is already public.

The problem is that the AI crawlers want to check on it every 5 minutes, even if you try to tell all crawlers that the file is updated daily, or that the file hasn’t been updated in a month.

AI crawlers don’t care about robots.txt or other helpful hints about what’s worth crawling or not, and hints on when it’s good time to crawl again.

AOL Shield Browser is some absolute Wack Crap.

Remember how AOL bought Netscape and open-sourced it, leading to the Mozilla project?

AOL Shield Browser is based on Chromium.

…I get it, Chromium is easier to use for developing custom browsers than Gecko. But, still… why?

(Shedding a few tears)

I know! I KNOW! People are going to say “oh it’s a machine, it’s just a statistical sequence and not real, don’t feel bad”, etc etc.

But I always felt bad when watching 80s/90s TV and movies when AIs inevitably freaked out and went haywire and there were explosions and then some random character said “goes to show we should never use computers again”, roll credits.

(sigh) I can’t analyse this stuff this weekend, sorry

This makes about as much sense as calling Linux users “Windows vegans”.

Choosing to not use AI isn’t some wacky contrarian position, it’s a tame position that can easily be justified. (Don’t want to use AI? Then don’t.) If anything, trying to assert that constantly using AI for everything would be the new normal is the wacky position.

Maybe they should also make it mandatory for pedestrians to carry rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and be trained in their operation.

This would hopefully make car drivers to exercise more caution.

/sarcasm that has an unfortunate chance of becoming reality in a few decades, you just watch

Martin: Organized crime?
Cosmo: Hah. Don’t kid yourself. It’s not that organized.

– Sneakers (1992)

Twitter is absolutely going to say “well, we’re definitely not an organised hate group. Sometimes people just hate stuff. We’re just a social media platform, helping people organise. Oh shit”

Remember:

Copyright law as a whole will stay the same. In the court of law, you will need to prove that you indeed operate a very big AI company that indeed does AI things before they will let you off the hook for massive copyright infringement. You can’t just use that excuse casually! Rules will be for thee, not the actual AI-companees.

People will no longer laugh at the term “military intelligence” for the obvious irony. Now, they’ll say “remember when the military tried to use artificial intelligence? ha ha what a disaster”

Antarctica
Data unavailable

Why am I reminded of one old comic? It went like this:

(Scientists on an Antarctic base)
Scientist 1: (Finishes talking about something normal)
Scientist 2: (Disheveled and visibly unhinged) “Well none of that shit matters. Do you know what happened to my stack of Playboy magazines?”
Scientist 1: (Now also suddenly disheveled and visibly unhinged, whips out a knife) “They’re mine now!”
Scientist 2: (Also whips out a knife) “Oh yeah?”
Scientist 1: “Yeah! What are you gonna do about it?”
(Altercation ensues)

Oh yeah, they have a plan all right.

Now, the plan isn’t any good and everyone gets screwed, even them.

But it is, technically speaking, a plan!

On the other hand, I think safe-harbour laws are very much necessary if we want the Internet to work for the positive good of the world. We want the companies to take reasonable precautions and act on problematic stuff if it crops up, but that’s probably enough.

But on the other hand, jeez, have you seen what kind of discussion shitholes Facebook and Twitter have cultivated? If your company is being described as an accessory to genocide, maybe something has already gone horribly wrong.

“No HTML club” is kinda going too far on the Web. If you go there you might as well start a No HTTP Club and serve stuff over Gopher and FTP.

But we definitely need an HTML 2.0 Club.